Sunday, 3 March 2013

The Dark Side of Botticelli.

For many people Botticelli was responsible for producing
the most well-known renaissance painting: the Birth of Venus. This
masterpiece which is notable for its velvety grace and idealised beauty fixes
in the minds of many the essence of Botticelli’s art: painting sympathetic to mythological
classicism, yet responsive to the current innovations of design, stylistic elegance,
all culminating in beauty of form. Whilist that is certainly a fair view of
Botticelli’s art, there is a side of him that the public is less aware of: the
artist who painted disturbing, proto-surrealistic panels, as well as disturbing
religious allegories whilist under the spell of the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola.

Botticelli’s late religious art is especially
notable for its unsettling atmosphere and strained emotion, which is a far cry
from the sedate rhythms of the Birth of Venus and Primavera
completed in the middle years. The dark side of Florentine art did not escape
the attention of seminal art historians like Aby Warburg who glimpsed a shadow
peeping out from the sweetness and light
of bodies in works by Botticelli and Ghirlandaio;[1]
the draperies and forms derived from classical antiquity could suggest
liberation from the bourgeoisie life shown in domestic scenes; but classism
without distance and control could intoxicate the painter resulting in a form
of sterile mannerism and psychological disquiet, which characterises Botticelli’s
late art. The dark side of the antique was also present in its scenes of
violence which could unwittingly lead artists to a celebration of cruelty and
decadence, a spirit alive in Botticelli’s highly unsettling Nastagio degli
Onesti scenes, and even in early Medician commissions like the early Judith
panels.[2]
Later scholars have shared Warburg’s ambivalence towards the classical revival
in the renaissance; some have observed a different body of Venus, not the
perfect, idealized one that art history has worshipped: instead, a darker, disregarded
body that belonged to the anatomists and obstetricians; not the body of composers
of romantic poetry nor the frequenters of renaissance pageant.[3]